If there’s one thing everybody in Toronto could agree on, it’s that for the last two years, Bloor Street has been hell. From the dust and noise of the relentless digging, to the gigantic staging areas for the construction crews’ display of Tonka trucks and cables that slowed vehicles to an impatient one-lane crawl and relegated foot traffic to a narrow maze of batting cages, the “transformation” of Bloor has been nasty, brutish and long. But with the first real signs of it’s completion between Yonge and Church streets taking shape, the gain for all this pain is suddenly in sight.

At the busy corner of Yonge and Bloor, pedestrians now gather on an elegant inlaid chevron that directs them across the street like a stone arrow. In front of The Bay, a woman on the phone and her small dog enjoy the shade of a newly planted London plane tree that springs from the sidewalk out of a chic, rusted steel coil. Across the street at Freshii café, Meredith Gertin is enjoying a salad lunch on a new 50-foot wide sidewalk of charcoal grey granite overlooking a double row of planters spilling over with purple, yellow and lime Humboldt lilies, ferns, grasses and coleus.

“For the last couple of years it’s been like the G20 just trying to get around all the barricades”, says Gertin, who calls Bloor Street “easily” the best shopping area in the city. “But now it’s really starting to look great.”

Naysayers have grumbled about the delays (caused largely by complex, underground hydro issues, according to Briar de Lange of the Bloor-Yorkville BIA, which spearheaded the project), the expense ($20-million for the BIA, which is being footed by the street’s retailers, with cost overruns still to be determined between Hydro and the city) and the fact that the new, improved Bloor will be four lanes for vehicles instead of six, with neither curbside parking nor bike lanes.

What outweighs these concerns in my view is that, like it or not, the stretch of Bloor between Yonge and Avenue Road is this country’s Fifth Avenue. It has already been recognized as such by global brands from Nike to Gucci, who have recently invested significant millions in their flagships along the boulevard, despite the fact that the street has for years looked much like a dog’s breakfast.

“I had reservations about moving to Bloor when we first moved there in 1992,” says Hermès Canada President Jennifer Carter. “You have to remember it was quite grim. That was before Tiffany came along and all the other luxury brands.” Two years ago, on the heels of neighbouring renos at Chanel and Vuitton, Hermès dug in even deeper on Bloor, lavishing some serious coin on a 4,500 square-foot flagship on the north side of the street, worthy of the chicest shopping areas in Paris or Tokyo. “Bloor Street now is a world-class street and it deserves to look like one,” says Carter.

Indeed, the cultural and commercial significance of such public gathering spaces has been well established since, um, around 1724, when Paris first widened the sidewalks along what came to be known as the Champs Élysées. And in one of the most positive moves for public space with panache in Toronto in decades, the city’s haute-est high street finally promises to look as well turned out as its habitués and tenants.

The problems with the old, patched-up Bloor, according to Peter Clewes of Toronto-based Architects Alliance, who was retained to design the transformation, were manifold. Narrow sidewalks, poor or non-existent tree canopy, extremely degraded sidewalk pavement quality, and, primarily, a lack of a coherent identity, noted the vacationing Clewes in a terse email.

Which led Clewes to undertake a complete redesign of the street that in his words was a “deliberate attempt, not only to support a significant shopping street, but also to create a distinct identity” that would “fundamentally alter and improve the quality of the public space.”

To get there, the design called for the elimination of curb parking in order to widen the sidewalks by a minimum of four feet on each side (the sidewalks along both Chicago’s grand Magnificent Mile and the Champs Élysées are typically 30 feet wide), high-quality, sustainable granite paving (“Atlantic grey” granite mined in Quebec), a seamless extension of paving right up to the building faces and extensive planting of trees.

Some 138 handsome London plane trees (selected for their comparative durability and local rarity, although they are locally grown) will be planted on the stretch from Church St. to Avenue Rd., with a unique soil-cell installation to ensure a longer life cycle, and watered with a low-impact, passive irrigation system.

At Holt Renfrew, Alix Box, Holt’s senior vice president for stores and distribution, has been making the best of all the disruption by mounting cheeky signs outside the entrance inviting customers whose “’dos have been damaged” to come on in to the salon.

This week, as the first granite pavers were being set in front of the store, she started getting excited.

“I can see the finished part outside my office window and it’s really starting to look refined and special, but at the same time, very people-friendly,” says Box. “It’s just a nice, big welcome mat that I think is going to make a huge difference not only for us, but for Toronto.”

A difference that, in this czar’s opinion, will prove well worth the wait.

Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. See more at karenvonhahn.com and contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.

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